Weekend trip: Austria

This post is from one of our last weekend trips in Switzerland.  When we found out that it would be our last couple months there, we made plans to visit Austria for a weekend.  I just had to get it on the blog (even if months later).

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We drove to St Anton am Arlberg because we had heard that it's a great skiing area with tons of mountains.  It was beautiful October weather in small towns along this valley and mountains on all sides.  

It was perfect autumn weather.  We had planned on exploring and hiking up cable cars to the higher elevations.  Unfortunately, we didn't know that the mountain lifts are closed in between the summer and winter seasons.   Oh well!  

We found a nice little apartment in one of the teeny towns a couple minutes from St Anton am Arlberg.  We took walks around the apartment and right up the side of the mountain on a famous trail.  We went to an amazing bakery.  We even found a forest road that went quite a ways up the mountain.  Then we parked at one of the lift stops and hiked up to get an amazing view of the mountain.

On the way home, we stopped at another little mountain town closer to Switzerland but still in Austria.  It advertised as having an open lift that went to a nice mountain top restaurant and play area.  We had our hopes up to take the cable car up and got there to see that it was closed.  Huge bummer.  So we found the forest road and took it as far as we could (before some construction).  Then we strapped the kids in the backpacks (with very limited snacks and water---bad idea).  We ended up hiking to the top which took a couple hours and we found the (closed) restaurant and play area.  The kids did great.  It was one of those, "should we keep going?  or should we just turn around? how far do you think it is?" hikes.   Luckily there was only one major meltdown from our sweet girl.

This picture is deceiving...I carried her most of the way.  

Oh my gosh, his hair looks so....euro here.  Get that kid a haircut stat!

It was a long, tiring hike.  My sweet husband also took the lead on some very steep shortcuts which helped with time but had us carrying both kids most of the way.

We ended the trip on a good note: stuffing ourselves with McDonalds afterwards.  It was so beautiful!  One friend jokingly (but half serious) said that Austria is Switzerland but cheaper.  It's on my list of places to go back to but hopefully during the winter so we can ski down some of those amazing mountains.